I gave a lightning talk at ELS 2018, in which I claimed I would release the code in "something like two weeks". That was 4 months ago :-). I apologize for the delay, especially to Zach who expressed interest in how we did the Docker thing at the time. I wanted to clean up the code before the first public release (I'm a maniac like that), which I did, but it took some time.

Compared to what I announced at ELS, Quickref also has a couple of new features, most importantly the ability to generate documentation for only what's already installed, rather than for the whole Quicklisp world. This can be very convenient if you just want some local documentation for the things you use daily. Finally, there is also a very rudimentary support for multithreading, which currently doesn't bring much. But the code has been prepared for going further in that direction; this will be the topic of another internship which will start next September.

Today, we deployed the first version of Quickref, a new global documentation project for Common Lisp.

The purpose of Quickref is to provide a centralized collection of reference manuals for the whole Quicklisp world. This means around 1500 libraries, for a total of around 3000 ASDF systems. The reference manuals are generated by Declt, which is probably the most complete documentation system for Common Lisp currently available, and delivered in HTML (PDF versions could easily be made available as well).

A lot of things can still be improved, but I'm pretty satisfied with the result so far. 3000 ASDF systems is a hell of a test suite for Declt, and I'm happy to report that it passes on practically all of them. Only a couple of issues remain, not even due to Declt itself, and less than a dozen or so libraries still pose problems (mostly technical difficulties due to foreign dependencies).

Quickref was made by Antoine Martin, as part of an internship with me. Many thanks to him! We still have some cleanup and packaging to do, but we expect to open-source the infrastructure soon. I also want to thank Mark Evenson, Erik Huelsmann and the Common Lisp Foundation for hosting the project on common-lisp.net (it was only natural)!

Finally, let me restate this again (and again): reference manuals are not user manuals. They are... reference manuals. Although automatically generated, there are some things you can do, as a library author, to improve the output (this is an area of Declt which I intend to work on in the future). Please refer to the Declt user manual (notably section 3.2 Coding Style) for more information.

I'm happy to announce the release of Declt 2.3. Declt is my reference manual generator for Common Lisp libraries.

The improvements and bug fixes in the last two releases are the result of running Declt against the whole Quicklisp world (around 3000 ASDF systems for 1500 libraries).
See this post for more information.

New in this release:

Advertise file extensions in references.

Advertise the type of foreign definitions.

More robust display and indexing of, and with, lambda-lists.

Use UTF8 special characters to denote invisble ones.

More robust support for Texinfo brace escaping.

Handle modules sharing the same location.

Ensure output is done with standard IO syntax.

Fix potential duplication of some (non-lisp) files and document all static files.

Fix potential duplication of packages documentation.

From the 2.2 "Christopher Pike" release (not previously advertised):

Require a UTF-8 environment.

Understand ASDF's notion of inferred system, and also be more protective against ASDF extensions.

Support for improper lambda lists (e.g. destructuring ones).

Improve contact defaulting code.

Update support for SBCL's setf expanders introspection.

Accept ASDF system designators.

Various bug fixes in the areas of method combinations, accessor definition merging and setf expanders.

Declt 2.0.1 "Benjamin Sisko" is out. This is a bugfix release with one internal change (a special variable was not following the earmuffs convention) and one actual bugfix (the same Texinfo anchor was generated for symbols with the same name but in different packages).

Declt 2.0 "Kathryn Janeway" is out. This release doesn't contain any change in functionality, yet deserves a major version upgrade since it contains 3 important changes: an infrastructure revamp (along the lines of what Clon endured not so long ago), a license switch from the GNU GPL to a BSD one, and finally a system / package name change. The prefix is now net.didierverna instead of com.dvlsoft. Do I need to apologize for this again? :-)

as promised last week, I've just released a new version of Declt, my reference manual generator for ASDF systems. This new version (1.1) is now able to document Clon again (the documentation of which has been updated on the website).

New in this release:

Declt now properly handles and documents complex system and component dependencies, such as :feature:require and :version statements,

Declt also documents a system's :if-feature if any.

But the most important addition is the ability to document several ASDF systems in the same reference manual. More precisely, Declt now documents not only the main system but also all its subsystems. A subsystem is defined as a system on which the main one depends on in any way, and which is also part of the same distribution (under the same directory tree). Declt also understands multiple system definitions from the same .asd file.

I've just released a new version of Declt, my reference manual generator for ASDF systems.

This release containts some improvements based on Sabra Crolleton's feedback. The most notable improvements are support for two new license types (MIT and LGPL), a new :DECLT-NOTICE keyword argument that gives you control on the "automatically generated by Declt" notice that appears in the reference manuals, and a bug fix (missing support for empty lists in lambda-lists).

I've just released a new version of Declt, my reference manual generator for ASDF systems.
This release includes some uninteresting internals update, plus an important bug fix: there were two calls to FIND-METHOD missing an ERRORP flag set to nil, leading to Declt throwing an error where it shouldn't have.

I've just released the next version of Declt, my reference manual generator for ASDF systems.

This release includes some fixes for the Info format target but most notably, support for documenting (generic) writer functions and methods. When it makes sense, the documentations for func and (setf func) are grouped together. Getting closer to an official 1.0 stable version...

I've just released a new version of Declt, my Texinfo reference manual generator for ASDF systems. This release contains only one bugfix: when trying to create links to source files, Declt now checks whether the files actually exist or not.

Tracking this bug down had the side-effect of exhibiting a misfeature of SBCL's introspection facility: the COPY-<struct> functions (automatically generated by defstruct calls) have their definition source set to target-defstruct.lisp which is an SBCL source file. It would make more sense to set it to the file containing the defstruct call instead, as is already the case for constructors, predicates and accessor functions. Patch sent to the SBCL developers.